First appearance: Playtest 3 (Pre-Launch) — Brunhilda Doogle v White Hat H03 (Mudcat and Caustic duke it out in a 1v1 test) · watch it on YouTube
Brunhilda Doogle is a yuan-ti ranger with coral-snake scales, a cherished longbow and a deep, personal grudge against oil that pollutes Mother Nature. In Playtest 3 (Pre-Launch) — Brunhilda Doogle v White Hat H03 (Mudcat and Caustic duke it out in a 1v1 test), she faced the robot gunslinger White Hat H03 across a craggy cliff. The fight ran through floods, rockslides, lightning and a very short-lived snake friendship. It ended with the two champions killing each other within moments.
Story
Brunhilda began the fight perched on top of the rocks, with White Hat H03 on the ground below. He struck first: his “special robot eyes” saw straight through her cover, and three pistol shots found her. She answered with two arrows aimed “at your stupid mechanical shiny head,” then slipped behind a rock and dared him to come up after her. “You do not know anything about cliffs,” she warned. “If you fall, you will die.” When he struggled up the rock face and magically blinked the last stretch, she sneered that it was “Greasy Step,” his oil “polluting Mother Nature in all her glory.”
The early fight went her way. When White Hat’s eyes glowed red as he tried to curse her, she shrugged off the spell so completely that it short-circuited in his own brain and cursed him instead. “I’m rubber, you’re glue.” She lashed him with a whip of thorns, dragged him to the cliff edge and grabbed his “smug little metal face.” Then she knocked his white hat off the cliff. The Acolytes promptly started calling him “White Hat Ho,” and he answered “Nobody calls me a hoe but me,” spitting oil into the front row and at Brunhilda. After he blocked her shove with a shield formed from his gun, she wrapped her tail around his feet and threw him off the ledge. Then she smeared herself with dirt and vanished against the rock.
Wounded and desperate, she found some unfamiliar purple berries and ate them anyway (“Berries, I eat you!”). They healed her, and they also made her see funny colors. These were “dog berries,” and she kept eating them for the rest of the fight until the side effects stopped bothering her. Meanwhile White Hat slipped off the rock face he had greased with his own oil. From hiding she sprayed him with poison, which a robot barely noticed. She then terrified him with the image of a giant screwdriver with angry eyebrows, “kind of like Clippy from Word,” spinning over his head.
Then the Void turned on them both. A flood washed the two champions off the cliff, and Brunhilda rode the wave (“Snakes can swim”) while the rain began rusting White Hat’s armor. His gun jammed and he fixed it, then shot her bow hard, but she held on. She drew two short swords (“I will stab you like Caesar!”) and licked his oil off her blade to intimidate him. It hurt her, and nobody was impressed. Next, a constrictor snake slithered out of a hole and chipped a tooth biting White Hat’s metal leg. Brunhilda charmed it, and it followed her “like a puppy,” the two of them rattling their tails in unison. White Hat, now free of his fear, found his hat in the mud, dusted it off and shot her new friend into flopping sections.
Grieving (“Oh, this hurts so much, my snake friend”), Brunhilda turned invisible, ate more berries, and shot the loose rock above him until two rockslides buried him. “I will bury you alive.” A bolt of lightning struck them both and knocked her back into view, and White Hat shot her bow out of her hands. “My precious bow! That was a gift! You’ll pay for this!” She charged, wrapped her tail around his neck and lifted him off the ground, vowing to “suck all of the oil and life from your cold metal frame.” Her squeeze fired every neuron in his synthetic brain, and his hand jerked the trigger, shooting her in the stomach. She dropped “like a ribbon falling to the ground,” her blood mixing with his oil. Moments later, rain poured into his crushed throat and he short-circuited for good. The match was declared a tie.
Personality and Abilities
Brunhilda wears the colors of a coral snake: red and black, with gold where the yellow should be and a touch of silver. She speaks with a hiss and fights with theatrical menace, but she is never quite as frightening as she hopes. Her intimidation attempts include licking robot oil off her own sword, which only hurt her. She is a fierce defender of nature and treats White Hat’s leaking oil as a personal insult to Mother Nature.
In combat she is a patient hunter. She fights from the high ground with her longbow, hides in plain sight against the rocks, throws her voice and turns invisible. She also carries two short swords, and her tail strikes, throws and strangles. Her magic includes a lashing whip of thorns, poison spray, frost and conjured terrors. She can befriend snakes, though only snakes, and claims to be immune to poison. Her longbow was “a gift,” and losing it enraged her.
Relationships
- White Hat H03: Her opponent, a robot gunslinger whose oil, hat and smugness she despised; they killed each other.
Memorable Quotes
- “You do not know anything about cliffs… if you fall, you will die.” (Playtest 3)
- “It’s not Misty Step, it’s Greasy Step. The oil just seeps from you… polluting Mother Nature in all her glory. She hates you for it.” (Playtest 3)
- “I have the high ground, White Hat Ho.” (Playtest 3)
- “I will stab you like Caesar!” (Playtest 3)
- “My precious bow! That was a gift! You’ll pay for this!” (Playtest 3)
“I will murder you and I will suck all of the oil and life from your cold metal frame… Even if I have to hold you till you rust in the rain.” (Playtest 3)